Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
Herbert A. Simon's research has ranged from computer science to psychology, administration, and economics, and philosophy. The thread of continuity through all his work has been his interest in human decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications of these processes for social institutions. For more than 40 years, he has been making extensive use of the computer as a tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence.
Born in 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Simon was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936, Ph.D., 1943). He has held research and faculty positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of Technology, and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, and a member also of the Departments of Philosophy and of Social and Decision Sciences, and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration.
In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986 the National Medal of Science; in 1969, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, in 1975 the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (with Allen Newell), in 1988, the John von Neumann Theory Prize of ORSA/TIMS, and in 1995, the Research Excellence Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Simon's books include Administrative Behavior, Human Problem Solving, jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial, Scientific Discovery, with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, and Jan Zytkow, three volumes of his collected economics papers (Models of Bounded Rationality), two volumes of collected psychology papers (Models of Thought), a volume of papers on philosophy of science (Models of Discovery), and his autobiography, Models of My Life.
